Friday, October 18, 2013

Commentary - School meals can do more than just feed children

By Charlotte Broyd and Francis PeelPartnership for Child Development, Imperial
College London

Each year on 16 October World Food Day aims to increase understanding of problems and
solutions in the drive to end hunger, malnutrition and poverty. Over the years
the themes day has taken on various themes which have focused on investing in
agriculture and recently focus has been drawn on health and education too.

One solution which countries have put in place to
combat hunger and poverty is to provide free school meals to their
schoolchildren, and now an increasing number of governments are looking at how
school feeding can do the same for their smallholder farmers.

The popularity of school feeding is simply that it
gets results - results in terms of happier, healthier and better educated kids.
The evidence base shows that school feeding
increases pupil enrolment, improves retention and that educational outcomes
improve as children are able to concentrate better and ultimately enter adult
life later and better equipped. These benefits are felt the most in the poorest
communities. In short school feeding provides a very effective social safety
net.

Increasingly countries are beginning to realise that
school feeding can do more than just benefit school children. By procuring their food locally school
feeding programmes can support marginalised smallholder farmers by providing
them with a constant stable market for to sell to. Increasing profits for
smallholder farmers whilst at the same time providing fresh and nutritious
local food. These Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programmes have the potential to build strong rural
economies by creating jobs
and profits not only for smallholder farmers, but also for a wide range of
stakeholders involved in getting the food from the field to the classroom.

In Africa
there has been substantial adoption of the concept with government HGSF
programme,s of one design or another, created
in Botswana, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and
Tanzania.

A leading
champion of the HGSF approach is Ghana. Eight years ago former Ghanaian
President and World Food Prize Laureate, H.E. John Kufuor launched Ghana’s School Feeding Programme (GSFP) as an initiative to improve food
security, increase in school enrolment and reduce poverty. From a pilot
programme of just 10 schools, the popularity of the programme has seen
successive governments expand the GSFP to feed over 1.6 million children from
across 4900 schools. In that time Ghana became first sub-Saharan African
country to half the number of people living on less than a dollar a day.

A beneficiary
of the GSFP is Jacob Mechi, a smallholder farmer who works in Kwabenya-Atomic area
of Accra, Ghana. He explains, “The programme is very good for me because I can
sell my crop direct from my farm without having to spend extra money on transporting
it to market… I am proud that it is my produce that is being used to feed the
schoolchildren.”

There are still important knowledge gaps which have to be addressed to
ensure safe, effective and sustainable programmes. As highlighted by the tragic
deaths of 22
children in Bihar, India, earlier this year, there is a need to
continue to improve the standards and quality of global school feeding systems.

Further research is also being conducted to fully understand how to best
design these programmes so that they maximise the benefits felt by all people
who make up the school feeding supply chain, from the the farmer on their smallholding, to the
processor in their mill and the child
sat in their classroom.

This year’s World Food Day theme is, “Sustainable Systems for
Food Security and Nutrition”, and when HGSF is effectively implemented it can
be just that - a sustainable structure to combat food security and nutrition
and one which is a win-win for children and farmers alike.

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